Money-Code » theories

Staying Connected – Flogs, Amazon Tax and CC Rebills

admin — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 16:12:46 +0000

As a affiliate marketer it’s very important to stay connected to other marketers and networks. This is critical to understand changes in the market place and to be able to foresee dangers down the road to your own affiliate network.

For example, there are a variety of ‘hot’ topics being discussed on Twitter and blogs out there. These topics are flogs (fake blogs), Amazon tax and Credit Card rebills.

Flogs have been a hot topic for a bit. It’s basically the creation of fake blogs to market a specific offer, and then driving traffic via PPC and SEO to the site. The blog has fake testimonials and endorsements created to give confidence to a prospective buyer. Flogs often target weight loss and beauty offers. The buzz surrounding these is the potential for legal action to creators of flogs, which can impact future affiliate marketing.

Personally, I have ethical issues with this type of promotion. I don’t mind providing a landing page with a ‘Buy Now’ or ‘Great Offer’, but to actually create fake content talking about how it changed your world… seems unethical and totally misleading. Commercials do this (I’m not a doctor, but I play one on TV), but those are being created by the merchant, and they’re responsible for their own liability based on their own product or service.

The Amazon Tax is where a state tries to collect taxes from online shoppers. This can greatly affect merchants, publishers and consumers out there and will directly impact affiliate marketing in the future. There are a few groups that trying to lobby, but not sure at what extent to prevent this. I’m planning to look further into this and see what I can do to add my voice.

Credit Card rebills is definitely not a new tactic, but seems to be growing in popularity. It’s basically when you sign up for a “free” service but need to provide a credit card. After the trial period is up, your card is charged unless you cancel, but of course, canceling can be difficult or ignored. How does that affect affiliate marketers? Well, just like in the ring tone space, some information was not explained fully on affiliate created landing pages, also you may be contacted by the consumer thinking you’re the one that charges the card. To me this means you need to be cautious of potential offers, and find reputable companies that comply with discontinuing the charges when asked.

All of these topics are worth noting, and may affect your current affiliate marketing efforts. Staying connected with what’s going on, asking questions and identifying potential trouble areas in the future can help you avoid issues and more importantly, loses.

End the stop and go effect

admin — Sun, 10 Feb 2008 05:29:35 +0000

Lately I’ve been talking to a good blend of internet marketing rookies as well as seasoned veterans. These discussions let me see trends, habits and thinking from various sides of affiliate marketers. One thing that I’m learning, either by talking to the vets or noticing it in my own perosnal experience, is to end the “stop and go” effect. This is the idea of building and or promoting, then stopping to see what comes from it… or taking a break. Then after you see improvement, you start up again. As a few of you might notice, is that I preach the “be productive” moto, and this can be easily applied to this. The stop and go can really slow down your rate of success, during the period of not doing anything.. or waiting, you could have pushed out more sites, or worked on traffic generation. I always see the posts on forums referring to not making money on x number of sites, and now I want to try again. When I see posts like this, I’m always saying, if you continued to work on the site or created more sites, you’d be doing much better, and now you’re basically starting over again.

To avoid the stop and go, you need to have a plan, goal and determination. This is extremely simple. Start with a goal. As I stated earlier my goal was to create four stores a month, so this forces me to make stores at a fairly rapid rate. I want to find new niches and new techniques to get a few more commission dollars, and I don’t want to do the old “paralysis through analysis” game, so I like to create some testers and see what’s out there. Between store launches I focus on traffic generation along with PPC, again constantly staying in motion. As you look back you’ll notice a strong growh of sites and or traffic. By pushing hard, you’ll see profits increase, and your tester sites should be giving you good data on niches worth pursuing. Now, I’m including Squidoo lense creation and some new PPC campaigns either with landing pages/offers or additional tweaking of existing campaigns.

I know a few of you are saying, who has the time? Who has the money to create sites? Frankly, that’s BS. If you’re saying this…you are in the wrong business, and should stop immediately. I currently have my own web dev business where I work 60 hours a week, easily. So time is where you can find it. If you’re watching TV, you just wasted time. You can always find wasted time to devote to this. As far as money, all my expenses have been paid for by my affiliate marketing. I don’t use any money from my pocket and roll profits back into promoting more sites or purchasing more domains. Read “takes money to make money” post where I address this as well.

The hard part is staying determined. The easiest remedy of staying focused is getting excited about success. Once you start seeing potential or a few dollars come in, it gets much easier. For the rookies out there.. it is IMPORTANT to get some early success. Money coming in either by AdSense or CJ or whatever is important. Try to develop a consistent “base” of income. Once you’re at a point where you can say, “I make $5/day no matter what” you’ll be at a good place to start expanding. From there, you start to figure out how to make $10 then $100, etc. Lately I’ve been talking to a good blend of internet marketing rookies as well as seasoned veterans. These discussions let me see trends, habits and thinking from various sides of affiliate marketers. One thing that I’m learning, either by talking to the vets or noticing it in my own personal experience, is to end the “stop and go” effect. This is the idea of building and or promoting, then stopping to see what comes from it… or taking a break. Then after you see improvement, you start up again. As a few of you might notice, is that I preach the “be productive” motto, and this can be easily applied to this. The stop and go can really slow down your rate of success, during the period of not doing anything.. or waiting, you could have pushed out more sites, or worked on traffic generation. I always see the posts on forums referring to not making money on x number of sites, and now I want to try again. When I see posts like this, I’m always saying, if you continued to work on the site or created more sites, you’d be doing much better, and now you’re basically starting over again.

To avoid the stop and go, you need to have a plan, goal and determination. This is extremely simple. Start with a goal. As I stated earlier my goal was to create four stores a month, so this forces me to make stores at a fairly rapid rate. I want to find new niches and new techniques to get a few more commission dollars, and I don’t want to do the old “paralysis through analysis” game, so I like to create some testers and see what’s out there. Between store launches I focus on traffic generation along with PPC, again constantly staying in motion. As you look back you’ll notice a strong growth of sites and or traffic. By pushing hard, you’ll see profits increase, and your tester sites should be giving you good data on niches worth pursuing. Now, I’m including Squidoo lense creation and some new PPC campaigns either with landing pages/offers or additional tweaking of existing campaigns.

I know a few of you are saying, who has the time? Who has the money to create sites? Frankly, that’s BS. If you’re saying this…you are in the wrong business, and should stop immediately. I currently have my own web development business where I work 60 hours a week, easily. So time is where you can find it. If you’re watching TV, you just wasted time. You can always find wasted time to devote to this. As far as money, all my expenses have been paid for by my affiliate marketing. I don’t use any money from my pocket and roll profits back into promoting more sites or purchasing more domains. Read “takes money to make money” post where I address this as well.

Readers vs. Buyers

admin — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 15:26:25 +0000

I’ve been corresponding with a few people.. and also found myself talking about this at lunch the other day. This is usually a good sign it’s blog post worthy.

When trying to monetize your site, you immediately think of what products or banners or offers to lay in your site. This is fine, but this thought is often a “after thought”, meaning when the site was originally created, it wasn’t designed to be a monetary site by initial design. Sure, you’d like to make some cash, and adding some banners or adsense make sense. The problem occurs months later when you realize that your site doesn’t convert. One thing to be aware of, and if you’re not aware of this by this time, I seriously wonder about your choice to get into this business, is that all web sites are NOT created equal. Meaning, when you create a web site, it won’t convert as good as everyone else by default! Each web site has a different focus and TARGET.

Okay, now we’re getting to the point. The target is the person you’re trying to get to spend money on your site, either actively purchasing something or passively clicking on a advertisement that pays (ie: Adsense). With that said, it’s time to understand the difference between READERS vs. BUYERS. Once you get a grasp of this, it should hopefully change your perspective of internet marketing.

If you’re trying to sell products on a “reader” site, you’ll need to get large volume of site visitors and traffic to really get a opportunity to convert. Reader sites are basically blogs or article related sites. Good content and people generally enjoy visiting, but you’re only chance to get them is with impulse advertisements or well placed text links. Readers are “readers” after all, and did not come to your site to buy something. They’re drinking their coffee, surfing the “net” or just burning time. These are the worst for selling products.

Buyers on the other hand are people that went to your web site looking to buy the product you’re selling. They have cash in their wallet and finger on the mouse to buy. This are the greatest type of people hitting your site, but if your site is a “reader” site, and you’ve attracted “buyers”, you better make it easy and quick for the buyer to buy, or they’ll leave quickly.

You need to optimize the site towards the target visitor you’re after. If you want to attract buyers, then design the site to be a store front vs a blog. Buyers want to see products and buy it very quickly. They’ve already done the research. Also, you can focus on long tail keywords with these sites, since buyers are going to input model numbers, etc for the product they’re looking for. Buyer sites are perfect for PPC campaigns, since you’re targetting a very select group of individuals that will convert.

If you’re leaning towards a reader site, then most of your traffic will be from Google and social networking sites. This is fine, but adjust your methods of monetizing. Google AdSense or other CPC (Cost Per Click) type ad network is the way to go. Take advantage of their indecision and boredom. They’re just clicking around, etc. Focus on inline text links to product since that will be the most affective way to get them to click on a product. Adjust your writing to product reviews. Readers are generally blind to banners, but adding a few of these could bring in a few dollars.

You definitely can blend the two types. For example you could have a great “buyer” site, which is a store front, but then add a section for product reviews or blog, etc. Treat that section as a reader site. This can give potential buyers an opportunity to read reviews, etc. But your focus should really be clear to take advantage of profits.

I would also experiment here. Possibly make one reader sites and one buyer sites. Try to find a similar niche for each. For example: Star Wars niche – one is a reader site, the other is a buyer site. Get unique domains for each. Try to apply the techniques above and see how you can improve both. This way you’ll get a feel for separating the types of sites and take advantage of ideas and techniques to improve both.

Setting realistic internet marketing goals.

admin — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:52:06 +0000

The dream of quitting your job and counting your millions of dollars seems to be the common dream that people have when starting internet marketing. Making money on line with nothing but a laptop, DSL account and a few hosted domains is pretty sweet, but we need to keep our dreams somewhat contained, so we can focus on gradual constant success. Let me say this again “Gradual Constant Success”.

When I set goals, I work with two sets of goals. Short term and long term goals. Just like everyone else, I think it would be cool to be a millionaire from internet marketing, so I keep that as a long term vision goal. But for the short term, I break that into one year and five year goals. As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, I wanted year one to be more of a learning year, a year spent to understand the ‘game’ and to potentially find some productive niches and affiliate networks. But I did have a one year “lofty” goal of 10k gross for 2007. It looks like I’ll fall short, reaching 8k, but I’m fine with that. I also had a ’side’ goal of never dipping in the red in 2007, and I met that challenge (this was done by diversifying niches, and forms of revenue generating sites).

I think for short term goals, it’s good to look at percentage of your yearly income. What seems realistic? 1% of your yearly income, 10%, etc. This will set the bar to see if you can reach that number. Once we’ve calculated a number at the end of the year, you can use that as a stepping stone for the following year. So I’ve made 8k in gross revenue from internet marketing in 2007. I feel that if I don’t do anything different, no new sites, etc, I should hit 8k in 2008. If I double my sites, and assume that all of my existing sites from 2007 will be better ranked in 2008, I could double or triple that number in 2008. So 2008 will start the five year cycle. Basically, I want to double my gross revenue every year for the next five years (lofty again).

This business takes a lot of patience, since returns might not fly in initially. It also takes a lot of persistence and awareness to understand where you stand in the big picture. I literally think about commissions all day long and try to figure out new ways to expand and get more commissions.

So let’s set some goals and focus on achieving gradual constant success.

2008 Internet Marketing Goals and a look back at 2007

admin — Sat, 22 Dec 2007 15:57:47 +0000

So 2007 is coming to an end. It’s time for reflection and to start planning goals for the coming year. I think reflection is really important. You need to know where you are coming from before looking to where you want to go. I officially started internet marketing in October 2006. That is when I signed up with CJ. I had a few sites running Google AdSense, but I was making about $15/month. Nothing to get excited about. After getting the CJ account, I began seeing the potential. My first month I made $90, followed by $190 for November and $120 for December. At this time, I knew I could make some money.

2007 started with my diversification plan. I had one community site that was doing well with CJ, so I decided to make another on a similar topic but exercising the 10 degrees of separation. Almost immediately, it began to gather content (generated by the public) and was getting traffic. Also at this time I generated a on-line article site dedicated to another area I’m interested in. The goals for both of these sites were simple.

Community driven content
Generate money from AdSense
Generate money from CJ ads
Generate money from paid banners
Provide a launching point for other sites in development

The first quarter of 2007 didn’t show much improvement from the earlier income stats, but I knew this would take time to develop worthwhile traffic. At this point I wanted to experiment, and decided that 2007 would be a year of testing. I needed to find what directions were promising or a bust. What advertisers were good, or a bust. I needed to learn from the big guys and get a feel of the ’scene’. I spent a ton of time on Shoemoney.com (but lately, I’m keep feeling it’s a sales-blog more than anything now-a-days) and DigitalPoint forum. I’m not the type of personality that gives up quickly or expects overnight results, which is good, since this area of marketing is tough.

About half way through the year, I decided eBay was where I was beginning to see the best results and decided to work that angle harder. Here is when the eBay store fronts (not BANS) begins to come into play. I began fishing with store fronts. Picking niches and seeing what had good opportunities. I also wrote a pretty extensive site tracker. This tracker shows all of my sites and the amount of expenses vs earnings. This is broken down by months with a year end profit/loss total. I needed to see what sites were earning or losing, and ensure that end of the month bottom line was showing profit. This is absolutely critical to my business.

I began to isolate niches that showed promise. Dipping into the third quarter, I wanted to play with PPC. I dabbled in it off and on throughout the year, but I decided to stick with Yahoo and begin to play the sites a bit. It definitely cuts into your profit, and it’s hard to beat the organic Google love, but there is absolutely not a better way to get your sites off of the ground. Determining good PPC sites, I began to see how the PPC game is played in a limited sense. Profits started to climb. CJ sales were reaching the $600-$800/month mark, while AdSense was hitting over $100/month. My subscription banners were bringing in over $200/month, so now my monthly income from affiliates was hovering around $1000 – $1300/month. Not bad from $15/month when I started. Here is a post where I discuss this in more detail.

So what are my goals with 2008? My learning year is ‘over’, so I better step up to the plate in 2008.

Launch at least two community sites (my goal is to sell the sites in 2009.. we’ll see).
Double my eBay store fronts by September
Create at least 4 store fronts using CJ API only (no-ebay)
Double my paid subscription banner sales
At LEAST double my 2007 sales in 2008. I’ll be disappointed if I only double.
Start playing more with CPA landing pages with PPC
PR4 ranking for Money-Code.com

I’m hoping that I’m obviously illustrating that this takes time, patience and persistence. You need to constantly be pushing forward. Don’t get LAZY! I’m a web developer and Linux systems administrator by profession, so I have a busy day. Every spare minute or hour is devoted to this. When I hit a spot where I don’t have a lot of web dev projects, I don’t go on vacation or start sitting on the couch, I jump in full affiliate mode. You have to motivate yourself. See improvement, understand your failures and learn from them. Improve your skill set. That means getting into programming for some of you, or for me getting into business and sales. You also need to be creative and adventurous, identify potential revenue streams, and pursue those streams.

The affiliate market game

admin — Tue, 02 Oct 2007 19:40:05 +0000

This year was my first serious attempt at affiliate marketing. In January, I told myself that I would spend 2007 and test. That was my goal. Not to retire, not to succeed, not to make thousands of dollars, but to test and understand strategies. I know individuals like Darren from ProBlogger and Jeremy from Shoemoney will often get asked “what’s the secret”, and they’re answers are always the same – ‘test ideas’, ‘work hard’ and ‘just do it’. I can’t imagine how annoying that must be to say on a daily basis, but the words are extremely wise.

Taking these into account, I wanted to test what works for me and what doesn’t. I wanted to have at least three different directions for revenue. Not three different web sites, but three different strategies. The three initial strategies are as follows:

1. Commission Junction (store fronts)
2. Paid subscription banners
3. Google AdSense

I actually have a forth, which is landing pages and offers, but I’ve only dabbled with this. I’m hoping to spend the next couple of month on this topic. My plan was to go into 2008 with a foundation and build off of that.

As a programming affiliate marketer, you should look at how to tackle these strategies and test them with low cost at the end of the day. How I keep my costs low, is by first owning a dedicated server. Hosting charges don’t increase with each ‘test’ site. You can do this with a shared hosting plan that allows for unlimited domains. The only cost here would be domain purchase and the original hosting setup. This is critical!

Next, is paid traffic. Since all of my sites are basically new, I don’t want to wait for two years before I get some good search engine juice, or spend the countless up front hours of promoting my sites through blog comment submission, directory submissions, etc. I focus my time on Yahoo Search Marketing. I don’t bother with Google AdWords for now, since that would bleed me dry. YSM definitely sends good traffic that converts at .10/click. This falls into the other area of testing, which is split testing ads and generating ad campaigns. With the data of my own ads, I can see what niches convert, what keywords are good, etc. Once I have a ‘golden’ ad, I’ll create a Google AdWords ad to see if I can get some good traffic to the site. I see what sites perform well, and then begin my grass roots SEO campaigns on those particular sites. Basically, survival of the fittest Good sites that perform well, will get extra attention from me.

I also spent this year working on ‘community’ sites. These are sites where the public help generate content, discussion about certain items or topics. These are the places that might be good for subscription banners by companies that want to advertise on a very related site to their product or service. These take a lot of work, and have to develop over years to get a good following, but just like in stocks, I like to play a combination of long term as well as short term plays. Community sites are long-term investments that can seriously pay off.

Anyway, just wanted provide some food for thought. The key is to test, and test in a way that doesn’t cost you anything. All of my ‘tests’ are paid off by my earnings, so I’m never out of pocket. I dump all profit back into the pot for additional tests and PPC work. 2008 should be an interesting year.

My thoughts on the big 3 – Shoemoney, ProBlogger and Chow

admin — Sun, 23 Sep 2007 18:25:09 +0000

First off I want to say that I’m very new to the area of making money online via passive income streams. I’ve been in the field of web development over the course of 8 years, and my primary source of income is designing web applications for clients. So I’m not new with the web… just the enterprise of affiliate marketing and professional blogging.

When I started, I stared with Google AdSense on a community site resource web site I stared in 2000. Earnings were incredibly meager, approximately $5 – $15 per month. Nothing to get excited about, but as the months went by and my education of this field grew, earnings have been steadily increasing. My sites have grown, and I’ve joined multiple networks to help understand what pays for me, and what is not working so hot. Now, I’m breaking the $1000 per month threshold. Still nothing to get too excited about, but I’m seeing trends, and I’m starting to understand the ‘game’.

Through the course of learning about this field, I’ve discovered ShoeMoney.com, ProBlogger.net and JohnChow.com. To me these, are the sites to hit on a daily basis. They all offer various techniques and tips to help grow your business. Being a web developer and network/systems admin as well, I can relate to the hacking world, and how they break down characters. Black hats, grey hats and white hats. White hats are ‘good’, grey bounce around a bit and their ‘good’ behaviour can often be lumped in with the bad.. or blackhat.

When I look at the ‘big 3′. I seem them broken down into these groups.

ProBlogger.net – Darren Rowse. Talk about a Whitehat. I really enjoy his dedication to blogging and offering quality, thoughtful content for his readers. I really enjoy the fact that he avoids bragging and showing off, yet still gives the solid impression that he knows his business and knows it well. My only complaint about him is that he promotes the thought that ‘anyone’ can succeed at blogging, which is true, but succeeding at monetizing the blog and making a solid return takes a ton of work, beyond writing quality content. I like the inspiration, but he should give those warning flags of failure, and failure not due to content, but lack of effort, lack of imagination and lack of skill. The big 3 have skills to pay the bills, and do so!

I also want to say I really enjoy Darren’s video blog. You really get to see the person behind the site, and get a feel of what he’s about. I don’t know him, never met him, but I would like to. He seems like a very genuine guy.

Next, I would label ShoeMoney.net – Jeremy Schoemaker as a grey hat. I’ve read his blog every day of 2007, and I’m sure he would agree on being a greyhat. I believe he likes to test to the edge and see what happens. If there is a problem with TOS or policy, then he would fall back to compliance, but the ‘edge’ realm is a good place to make some untapped dollars, and being first is a good place to be.. but often risky. Since he pulls some incredible weight with affiliates, they’ll give him some wiggle room vs just banning him right away, so that’s a definitely an advantage.. and he’s wise to take it. I also like the fact that he promotes multiple sources of revenue. He’s most famous for the Google check, but I enjoy hearing about PPC campaigns, direct banners and creative web applications (ie: AuctionAds) that he can build and sell.

He’s what my dad would call and idea-guy, but he’s more than that. Since he has a solid background in programming and UNIX administration, he has the ability to test interesting ideas. More skills in my opinion is equal to more money. He’s now at the point where he has a programmer (dillsmack), and that just adds more to the strong base skill set. What I take away from ShoeMoney are the items ‘between the lines’. Obviously, he doesn’t draw a blue print for you to succeed, but rather that foundation you need to have to succeed. I really appreciate the topics of ‘Just doing it’ and ‘testing’. That’s truly the secret in my opinion. Try new things see if it works, see if it doesn’t work and learn how to make it better.

Just as ProBlogger, Shoemoney has a radio show that I enjoy as well. This is a great place to pull some tips since it’s unedited and live, and things can just ‘come out’ that might be very valuable if you’re listening. I would love to meet Shoemoney some day as well

Lastly, and I hate to call John Chow, of JohnChow.com, a ‘blackhat’, but under his own addmition at NetZero last week, he referred to himself as ‘evil’. Of course he’s not ‘evil’, but he likes to push the lines past the edge, and that pays for him as well. He recently got hammered by Google, and his site ranks low for John Chow, but that’s okay. He made some lemons into lemonade by getting rid of low paying AdSense blocks and selling high priced ad space.

Luckily, he’s at that position to make those adjustements. I enjoyed his talk on NetZero about not limiting yourself to one revenue stream (as all of you should already know).. but saying that you shouldn’t rely on one source of traffic (ie: Google). This wasn’t as obvious to me, but I took it to heart. Just like generating new revenue streams, it’s important to figure out other opportunities to bring in traffic (ie: paid traffic, social networking sites and other various search engies).

I really enjoy how he discloses his revenue and what works and what didn’t. His lumps can save me and you time depending on what you’re doing. I just started reading Chow that last few months, but I really dig what he has to say.

If you’re thinking about getting into affiliate marketing and monetizing your web sites, I would start with these blogs. Read read read, watch, listen, read, read and read some more. They’re designed to help develop your own plan and techniques.